On Aug. 11, 2013, Donald Telfair says, he was brutally assaulted by three men who thought he had robbed them earlier that evening. The 46-year-old spent the night at a hospital in Suffolk County, New York, where doctors had to wire his broken jaw shut. Then, he says, the police showed up.
“They arrested me for a robbery, a crime I did not commit,” Telfair told reporters during a conference call Wednesday. He spent 18 hours in custody before being arraigned. Telfair couldn’t afford a lawyer so he was assigned a public defender. But the public defender didn’t meet with him before the arraignment.
“Knowing nothing about me, she was unable to defend me,” Telfair said. When the prosecutor allegedly mischaracterized his criminal history, his lawyer didn’t object, and Telfair said he had to protest himself, speaking through the wires keeping his jaw shut.
But it wasn’t enough. Unable to meet the bail set by the judge, he was sent to jail, where he would remain for months before accepting a plea-bargained sentence of one-and-a-half to three years.
[For more of this story, written by Christopher Mathias, go to http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...mp;ir=Black%20Voices]
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